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Wednesday, 14 December 2016

The Victorians have left
us so many narratives of themselves that we are spoilt for choice if we want to
re-invent them for ourselves and in our own image. Sarah
Perry’s historical novel – set in 1893 - is very well crafted and constructed, the scenes
tight, the prose never slack, but her characters do tend to those which will be
handled without too much difficulty in the polite Creative Writing class
discussion or the Sunday School (or Guardian) book club. Oh, true, there is adultery but not
too much and even-handed lesbianism and male homosexuality but of a delicate kind to which even
a vicar would have to give his blessing. It’s one of the helpful things about
the Victorians; they did generally keep their clothes on. There is a minor sexual assault (p 178), but even then everyone appears to remain fully clothed. It sits rather awkwardly but I assume it is there to provide one more motive for Naomi Banks to run away from home, but those motives are so dispersed through the book that I suspect readers may have forgotten them by the time Naomi reappears two hundred pages later.

Projection of our own
wishes into the past is one of the risks in writing – and reading - historical
fictions. Another and simpler risk is that of anachronism, the kind which a friend
or an editor will spot. Sarah Perry knows her material well and has been left to slip
only occasionally: a first-class stamp
( p 415), unknown to the Victorians proud of their classless system - for most
of the period, one penny for a letter and a half-penny for a postcard; an urban housing
situation which is unsustainable (p
282), a term which belongs in the literary gutter anyway; and poor William Ewart
Gladstone gadding about with hookers
(p 48) which sounds to me so wildly out of place that surely I am wrong and it is
a Victorianism revived by Sarah Perry. For most of us, Gladstone walked the
streets in search of fallen women or prostitutes.

I read the first
hundred and fifty or so pages – probably more - with ease and pleasure, but then there is
a hundred pages where the chapters become over-burdened with sub-plots,
specifically those set in London. These sub-plots take us away from the
powerful device of the Essex Serpent, which is one of Perry’s big creative
devices. Then it picks up again when the serpent returns. Her other big
creative devices are her child characters, who despite what I presume are nods in the directions
of autism and gender fluidity, are all splendidly imagined and largely unthinkable as modern children. Her mad woman in the attic, the tubercular Stella, is also very interestingly imagined. There is a short scene
which moved me at page 387, a scene beautifully concluded, at the bottom of the
page, by one of Perry’s infrequent and restrained flashes of humour.

I bought this book
partly because I’d read an interview with the author in which she discussed her
writing habits and partly because Waterstones had a very attractively bound and
jacketed version on sale. The design and presentation of so many books in the shops
is dire; this one has been thought about.

Monday, 12 December 2016

This is an unusually interesting compilation of family letters and personal journals, kept in a suitcase by Willy Geheb (1900 - 1988), a blacksmith's and small farmer's son from rural Saxony in the eastern part of Germany. After the First World War, he leaves his home village to make his fortune in Brazil, Mexico and finally Chicago where he becomes an American citizen in 1934. He maintains - and keeps - a correspondence with his parents and members of a large family much of which survived to be discovered after his death, though material from the period after 1947 is missing.

From the point of view of a social historian, there is much here of interest. There is the hard life of an immigrant, the ambivalence of his family about his departure, their own changing circumstances as Germany struggles in the 1920s, their prompt adoption of Hitler in 1933, and their total dependence on Chicago-based Willy and his wife Irma for material help after Germany's defeat and the incorporation of their region into the Soviet Zone of east Germany. The letters which detail the contents of the parcels they have received are testimony to the poverty of immediate post-war Germany. But the birth of children is a constant of the family history, and no one ever hints at the possibility of achieving a better life through limiting family size. For, traditionally, children were assets to farming and small artisanal families. But in this story,not all of them survive and many are plagued by ill health.

Willy's blacksmith father is a conscientious letter-writer and tries to hold together a narrative and a set of values for the whole family until his death in 1945. He is stern, moralising and does not have a moment's hesitation in adding Hitler and Nazism to the Lutheran Christianity which serves him up until 1933. One of his sons, Paul, who comes across as rather unpleasant in his earlier letters to his brother Willy becomes an active Nazi. Willy in his letters is always urging other members of his family to get out and make their fortune in the USA but none do. His own letters are lively and concerned and, in the end, after 1945, he becomes the typical migrant burdened by the material needs of those back home, though he never complains and goes well beyond the call of family duty..

The family documents itself in photographs as well as letters, and the documentation must be unusually extensive for a family where no one has much formal education, even though by the standards of their village, they are well-established and relatively prosperous.

There is a Wikipedia page for Willy Geheb's home village of Schmirma and this book should certainly be added to the references on that page. There was no point at which the translation struck me as likely to be forced or wrong, and the book reads easily with fairly unobtrusive editorial comments to help sustain transitions in the story.

Most books I review here are ones I have bought; this one was sent to me for review.

Saturday, 10 December 2016

I sometimes imagine some post-mortem pie chart which
shows how I used the hours of my life.

Sleeping will provide the biggest slice,
of course. Next might come eating but I am pretty sure that in my case it will
be substantially beaten by reading. I began reading a lot when I was about
eleven and, since mine was a home without books, they came at first from public
libraries. In the sixth form, I began buying my own books. Newly arrived at
university, my rather scary Economics tutor, the late John Corina, snapped at
me, “Book a day, Pateman! Book a day!” thus setting a reading target which I
often fulfilled then and, fifty years later, sometime still do. And there
aren’t many books you can read in under six or seven hours, not if you read
them as I always do, cover to cover. I very rarely skim a book. So Book a Day is
almost a day’s work a day.

Asked that standard question about how – given a
second chance - you would live your life differently, I would have to reply
that I would think more about why I was using my time reading the book in my
hand. Looking back, I have read far too many books for no obvious purpose, not
even just for pleasure. Indeed, it would have better to have read more books
for pleasure and fewer for the rather obscure purposes of self-improvement, or
because the author was famous, or because it was sent to me for review, and so
on through a long list.

I would certainly have written more academic papers
– books, even - if instead of listening to that “Book a day!” injunction, I had
told myself to read all and only that necessary to write the next paper which
might then become a chapter of the next book. If any young academic ever asked
my advice (they don’t), I would have to say, Always read with some purpose and
the more narrowly-defined, the better.

I can see that there is a case against that view (Well,
I would, wouldn’t I?). If you stumble around as a typical “general reader”
(which is how I classify myself), you will chance upon things and, if you persist
long enough – like decades - some things will link up and allow you some new
insight denied to the researcher who sticks studiously to the literature “in
their field”. That is surely true.

Recently, I have been turning some old
journal articles in Pragmatics into a book – optical scanning plus copy and
paste makes it a cakewalk. I took the decision to make a consolidated
Bibliography for everything rather than leave references at the end of each
chapter. And when I checked through the fourteen pages which resulted, I was
very impressed. Whatever the quality of the chapters - probably mixed - the
Bibliography is in a league of its own. And (with two or three exceptions) I
have read everything on it. But no one is going to buy my book to read my
Bibliography, even though I can’t help feeling it deserves a prize for effort.

What I now see in that Bibliography is the
disproportion between the effort expended and the result. Many of those things
read contributed no more than a sentence in a footnote and, frankly, a sentence
in a footnote is not worth several hours’ work, not unless the result is a very
highly polished pearl of a sentence. But if it’s that, it shouldn’t be in a
footnote in the first place and it shouldn’t be a sentence. Academics nowadays
are measured for their output of orange juice, and you will be out of a job if
you only produce concentrated orange juice.

I find it hard to break with old habits. Not so long ago, I ordered a dozen books off Amazon, some deliciously obscure. One of
them, I knew in advance, might contribute one sentence to something I was working on. I was going to read four hundred pages on
Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought to squeeze out that
one sentence. I just had to make a pearl of it. But, for once, reason won out and after making myself skim the book I decided not to try for that one sentence.

In truth, I know there are short-cuts. Take my
advice. Use them.

The Times Higher invites emailed submissions of short Opinion pieces. I sent this in a few months ago, but got no reply, so here it is on my Blog

Thursday, 17 November 2016

Someone said to me recently that you don't finish a book; you abandon it. I had already got to the point where I was tinkering and was only spinning things out just in case some voice in my head told me to Start Again!

Donald Trump solved my problem. The book is not Current Affairs, but there is a theme about America which runs through it. And I thought: If I go on tinkering, Trump will start getting in and in ways which have not been thought through. Any re-writes will surely stick out as such. True, he's there already in the background of a sentence about building walls but that's it - and I decided to keep it that way. I don't want him in a last-minute foreground.

So I signed off. A couple of days later, Leonard Cohen died and confirmed my decision. He's in the book at least three times and I had written some nice things about him. His death gave me a further reason not to start fiddling around again with a near-final text. I didn't want to ramp up what I had already written and which had been quite carefully considered. I wrote a tribute while he was still alive and I will stay with what I wrote.

As well as working with an editor on every chapter, I found (using gumtree where lots of clever people looking for work can be found) a complete stranger to read through a late draft and it proved very helpful. I would have repeated the exercise, but a couple of emails I sent out in hope went unanswered; a third one was answered by someone Famous excusing himself as too busy.

Today I printed off a copy and read right through, just doing copy-edits and small style glitches. It's only 57 000 words. If my nerve holds, I'll send it to the typesetter on Monday. I'll keep you updated ...Update 20 November It's gone to the typesetter a day early under the title Silence Is So Accurate and I hope it will appear in 2017. I have worked up a cover I like but this can't be finalised until the page-length of the book is confirmed - that determines the spine width.

What I don't have for the cover is something which nowadays is more or less obligatory: I don't have any Puffs from friends, family and famous declaring my book the best thing since the last best thing. Should you be Famous and reading this, a Puff would always be appreciated. Of course, you don't have to read the book ...

Well, now the spine length is settled, here is the front cover. Publication due 15 February 2017, ISBN 9780993587924. Pages 224. Price £20. Available for pre-order at Waterstones and Blackwell and Book Depository.

Wednesday, 2 November 2016

I bought this book from the Waterstone's table of novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, read it during a week working in Germany, and by the time I got home it had won the Prize.

Novels deal with things at least some of which we will not be familiar with and sometimes will be completely ignorant of. But we manage, sometimes only partially. I don't think I understood everything in Paul Beatty's book and though I often smiled or occasionally laughed I am certain I did not get all the gags. So I am not a good judge of the book. That said, I have doubts about it which relate to other aspects than the gags I didn't get.

I felt the author was trying too hard, like a stand-up comedian on a bad night. I felt the book lacked structure, trying to do too many things and not always sure what those things were even though all the reviewers who are all over my copy are completely sure.* I felt that as it progresses it actually runs out of steam - the Supreme Court is not a climax but just a continuation. At just one point (page 266) did the book really move me in a short passage I felt could have owed something to Brecht.

I concede that this is a Minority Report. Time will tell. Go through the back list of Booker Prize winners and there are plenty there you will struggle to recognise - Was that the book about ...? - and, if you try to read those forgotten books, you will struggle.

* It amused me that The Guardian was there on the cover. If Paul Beatty had submitted an extract from this book for publication to that Sunday School newspaper, I am 100% sure it would have either not replied or would have set one of its endless supply of dire columnists onto him.

Monday, 17 October 2016

Waterstones had a table with Booker Prize Shortlist books and I bought this one for no other reason than that it has achieved publicity because it was brought out by a small publisher based in Scotland rather than thwacked on the table under some imprint of an international conglomerate media company - the sort of company which reckons it ought to be able to stitch up the Booker any time (look at some of the past winners!)

I read the 280 pages in a day, mostly without difficulty once I had got past the opening difficulty. Within a minute of beginning to read, I was thinking Pierre Riviere - the real-life 19th century French rural murderer who wrote a Memoir of his own deeds (I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother ... and wishing to make known the motives etc). It's true that Burnet briefly acknowledges the book at the end of a list (p 281), but the debt to Michel Foucault's work goes quite deep since the structure of this book in effect mirrors Foucault's presentation of the dossier on the Riviere case. I think that may cause a problem for the Booker jury. Macrae has had a lot of his work done for him.

But I got past this. The best part of the book is undoubtedly The Account of Roderick Macrae which takes up 137 pages of the 280 - so, a half. Here the demand on the author is that he proceed confidently in his narrator's voice and avoid the main pitfalls of such writing, which are anachronism and pastiche. Burnet opts for a fairly neutral prose which does not constantly try to evoke 19th century rural Scotland - he makes do with a small specialised vocabulary to give period flavour and provides a Glossary to it - and he avoids obvious anachronism. Once he uses "hobby" where I would have thought "pastime" and no doubt there are others like that but nothing dreadful.

The main problem (and this one also for the Booker jury) is that he does not quite bring off the uncertainty he creates around Macrae's motivation, nor does that uncertainty map straightforwardly onto the official theme of criminal insanity. In brief, Macrae committed three murders, one of them also involving a violent sexual assault - the medical evidence at pages 156 - 57 - on a girl (or the body of a dead girl) who has spurned him. That is nowhere mentioned in his own Account, which is to that extent either dishonest or obscured by an insane degree of denial. Nor does this possible motivation drive the narrative of the Trial until one witness alights on the possibility. There is a more complex narrative implied than the surface one but though it is fairly constantly hinted at it doesn't really get structured enough to give us a chance to engage with it.

Thursday, 13 October 2016

I started into this
three hundred page book of thirty eight mainly short chapters just as I was
finalising a book of twenty six short chapters which will take up a couple of
hundred pages, next year with any luck. I am glad I did not read it earlier.
The author knows how to tell a good story and tell it splendidly. Some of the
stories are tragic, some are hilarious. Some of the stories exude a sense of
“I’m old. Why not? Who cares? They're dead. So here goes …” If I had read them sooner, I would have
succumbed to last-minute influence.

My twenty six chapters don’t
include a narrative of the only occasion (to my knowledge) when anyone tried to
recruit me to British Intelligence. In 1972 I had found myself a job teaching
Liberal Studies to day release apprentices – bricklayers, plumbers, panel
beaters – in Devon. I was bent on subversion but in reality was simply making a
mess of it and I knew I had to try to give some better direction to my life. I
was twenty five now. So as a long shot, I booked in to talk to the Careers
Adviser at the University of Exeter. I don’t know how I blagged that, since I
had not studied there. But anyway, he interviewed me at some length, appeared
to think for a bit, and then asked me if I had time to take an IQ test – he may
have called it something else but to me he was just asking me to re-sit the 11+.
I had no qualms about doing that and happily filled in the test papers behind a
closed door, emerging to hand them over to my
interviewer. He scored them at his desk and then drew out from a drawer a
little brochure for GCHQ. Did I know what it was? Would I perhaps like to read it and think about it?

I was embarrassed; I
felt sorry for him. Though I most definitely over-rated the non-existent threat
I posed to National Security, I was probably not far off in thinking that it
was as if he was proposing a police career to an amateur criminal, not the career kind of criminal for whom it would be appropriate. I was
painfully reminded of the girlfriend who desperately wanted to be a real spy
and who regarded me as one of the main liabilities to her chances of success;
so she lied me out of existence, replacing me with the Double (who she was also
sleeping with). And that was four years ago, since when some of my unsuitable
friends had become even more unsuitable. I would have been curious to find
out more about GCHQ but felt they would surely turn me away on first
profiling and this decent man who had taken time out to interview me would be
made to look a bit of a fool. So I politely declined.

Now if you liked that
little bit of story you will surely like John le Carré’s book a whole lot more
because it is full of much stranger encounters with much larger-than-life
characters, most of them famous in their own right. He meets them all, if we
are to believe him and I’m not sure I do, in the course of doing “research” for
his next novel. But he does take a lot of personal risks, does do an awful lot
of research, and why would you be doing that unless you were a spy? And don’t
tell me it’s all about spying for your novels.

What I like a lot about
le Carré is his politics, which are not easy to pigeon-hole. He is part humanist,
part socialist and part what is (or was) occasionally called Tory Anarchist, an
expression you will understand if you align it with Manic Depressive or as we are now supposed to call it, Bi-polar.

This is a splendid
book, very easy to read, and full of surprises and strong feelings. (And I will let you
into a secret: I don’t usually write sentences like that on this Blog).

*

In chapter 35, Carre tells a story dated to 1967 in which he helps to secure "leave to remain" in the UK for a famous Czech actor who has left Czechoslovakia legally but who wishes not to return and equally not to defect or claim political asylum, which would result in retaliation against the friends and family he has left behind. Carre taps a few friends for help and has soon got a polite letter into the hands of the Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, and the rest is a history which Carre is able to narrate.

In the summer of 1967, aged nineteen, I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club once a purely party outfit but now less so - my own Labour Party membership, acquired at the age of 16 had lapsed in 1966. In my capacity as Chairman (I think) I was asked to a house in north Oxford and introduced to a Czech student, a boy I guess around my own age, living in a cupboard-sized room with a girl who may or may not have been Czech but who does not figure in the rest of the story. I forget who asked me to visit or what was said, but I was asked to help the boy stay in the UK and if I had to say now why he wanted to stay then I am prompted to say that he had done something political back home which put him at risk if he returned. But really I have forgotten, and maybe he just wanted to stay with the girl. Whether he had come out on a visa or clandestinely, I do not know. My effort to help consisted in setting up a Sunday morning meeting at the home of a Labour MP who lived locally, Robert Maxwell then resident in Headington Hall on the estate which housed his Pergamon Press publishing company. How I achieved this, I don't now know - this is of course before mobile phones and emails.Nor was I one of Maxwell's constituents - the voting age was still 21 and Maxwell was in any case MP for Buckingham.

We went along and I recall a grand reception hall with a harp on display. Then we were taken into a dining room with a vast and beautifully polished table. The boy sat on one side, me on the other, and Robert Maxwell at the top of the table. The boy's English was not very good and Maxwell soon turned to Czech and appeared to question him quite forcefully and at some length. At the end, Maxwell turned to me and explained that he had publishing contracts in Czechoslovakia and that he was afraid that the boy might be a provocateur, hence the questioning. Whether any promises were made, I don't recall and as to what happened next, I don't recall that either. That's the problem with trying to remember things fifty years later, at least for me it is.

Thursday, 6 October 2016

Living capital cities
are always full of foreigners and always have been. Occasionally, a sclerotic
regime has tried to keep them out – of Lhasa, for example – but most regimes
need them as diplomats, bankers, businessmen, engineers, skilled technicians, doctors,
translators, chefs, nannies, tutors, entertainers …

St Petersburg and
Petrograd (as it was from 1914) was full of foreigners – indeed, bringing in foreigners had been
government policy from the time of Peter the Great. All that the outbreak of
World War One did was to empty the city of Germans (except for the spies) and
replenish their ranks with additional Allied personnel. So when Petrograd led
Russia into Revolution, not just once but twice in 1917, there were plenty of
foreigners around to observe what went on and Helen Rappaport bases herself on
the records left by a relatively small cast of American, British and French
foreigners in Petrograd. She has produced a highly readable book though rather unbalanced.
Foreigners from neutral countries – and there were many in the First World War
including Russia’s near- neighbours Denmark and Sweden – were well-represented in
Russia working for Red Cross or similar relief organisations and they may have
had a different perspective on events in Russia to those involved in
the Allied cause. There were also at least some more working class foreigners
than those to be found here. Rappaport offers a view from the middle and upper
classes.

She has researched thoroughly
and I think that her narrative of the February Revolution which brought down
the unloved and unmourned Romanovs is very strong. For those at the time this
was the Revolution and what came
after in October was a coup.

But her lack of
sympathy for the Bolsheviks does lead to some carelessness. She produces “property
is theft” as a “favourite Marxist dictum” (page 308) when of course it is the catch-phrase
of a nineteenth century French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Lenin in 1917
did not speak of property as theft but urged the expropriation of the
expropriators using the more striking phrase “Loot the looters!” In an economy and administration which had literally
ground to a halt, the call to loot the looters was about the only means
available to the government to bring about any kind of redistribution of wealth,
whether from landlord to peasant or private owner to state. Even then, it could
not solve the problem of hunger which bulks large in Rappaport’s narrative. The
Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, the Provisional Government could not, nor
could the Bolsheviks. Many starved and between 1917 – 21 the population plunged
as those who could, left.

Again, she makes another
small slip, saying that the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on
13 February 1918, instantly adding 13 days (page 326). In fact, in Bolshevik controlled
areas, 31 January 1918 was followed by 14 February which would otherwise have
been 1 February. I have a postcard from a Danish traveller in Siberia writing
home on the 14th to say cheerfully that for the first time it’s the same date in both
Russia and Denmark.

I do think there is
more material around than Rappaport has discovered and she recognises this in
soliciting access to fresh sources (page 340). There is, for example, material
written on the back of postcards since
Russia’s postal service did function right through 1917 almost without interruption
– even in Petrograd and even if unreliable. Lots of mail did not arrive at its
destination and lots was delayed. Between the collapse of Imperial mail censorship and the imposition of Bolshevik censorship, there was a space in which people probably felt much freer to write about what they saw and what they were thinking, though the legacy of censorship probably still cast its shadow

Tuesday, 27 September 2016

This book was published
in 1970 when Germaine Greer was thirty or thirty one. I don’t think I read it
at the time, though I was reading some of the other work she discusses, and I
decided to read it now partly because at the age of seventy seven she is someone
who quite a lot of young women hate and want to No Platform.

The book starts a bit
uncertainly as Greer tries to behave like a proper scientist, adducing and
evaluating evidence. Some of this discussion seems a bit quaint because science
has moved on – for example, DNA testing did not exist in 1970. But it also
feels quaint when it engages the literature which the Discovery of Sex in the
1960s spawned, a literature in which it is very easy to get lost as it searches, sometimes blindly, for the location of the female orgasm. Then the book moves into sections where I felt that the text was
probably being eked out with material from Greer’s Cambridge doctoral
researches. Finally, Greer finds her own voice in the last hundred pages and
lets rip.

A few things struck me.
This is a book about relations between men and women. Lesbians get a few
mentions and gay men barely any (and the ones I noticed were not sympathetic mentions). It’s not Greer’s scene and she isn’t really
very interested. You could say that the whole book is about Greer’s own
dilemmas. She is a heterosexual woman who wants to relate to men (and probably in
the plural rather than the singular) but where the ways available for doing so
are profoundly unattractive, unlike individual men. She is beautiful, clever,
loud and likes relationships and sex - none
of which taken singly may sound particularly off-putting but which offered as a
package seem to have nowhere to go. Beautiful on its own allows you to be some
man’s trophy. Clever on its own allows you to be a blue stocking but after the experience
of Cambridge, No thank you. Loud is more difficult thanks to polite society and
likewise liking sex, which doesn’t seem to go with being someone’s wife and
having children. In the last hundred pages, Greer decides that marriage is the
main enemy and comprehensively trashes it. On all fronts, she does not want to be a eunuch and, to a greater or lesser extent,
that is the deal she feels she is being offered.

I did look for signs of
the thinking which has recently made her the focus of so much anger and it was
there in the odd cutting remark. In 1968 – 70 I was a graduate student in London and hung out with second wave
feminists who gravitated into things like the London Women’s Liberation
Workshops They appear at page 349:

When these worthy
ladies appeared at the Miss World Contest with their banners saying “We are not
sexual objects” (a proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were
horrified to find that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting
and dancing around the police…

The parenthesis did make me smile, for a moment, but immediately it's obvious that it manages to be both a
masculine unchivalrous remark and an unsisterly aside, the offence compounded
by the acid contrast of “worthy ladies” and “girls”. But behind the cutting
remark there is a perfectly coherent and worthy intellectual position: Greer
is quite clear that for her feminism is not an Anti-Sex League and that sexual
desire when not corrupted by patriarchy and capitalist advertising is indeed prompted and sustained by
individuals in all their individuality and not by persons as objects – something she acknowledges in a very
nice, single sentence about a truck driver and his wife (page 162). So you
might say she lands herself in hot water unnecessarily, carried away by
irritation and frustration. But if we made that a No Platform
offence, we would not need platforms.

Monday, 19 September 2016

This is a lovely book written by a thirty year old
woman who has returned to her native Orkney to recover having written off the
best part of ten years in London – most of the time spent in becoming an
alcoholic and staying that way. The book has a natural honesty, though I would
avoid phrases like “searingly honest” since that conventional trope tends to make the honesty a
smaller thing than it is.

A large part of the book’s interest lies in the way
Amy Liptrot uses her habitat in Orkney – the sea, the rocks, the birds, the
wind – as a thing to think with about her predicament. Occasionally, she seems
to be trying too hard at the metaphor or at creating what I suppose T S Eliot
might have called the “Objective Correlative” of her feelings. But most of the time
it does not feel forced and most of the time it is disciplined – the book does
not wander off at tangents but sticks to the twin themes of alcoholism and the exploration and inventorying of the natural world to which she has removed herself.

This discipline also helps the book to come across
as an act of reparation. She is repairing herself in writing it, making good wasted
time by doing something with her life, and also making some kind of gift to other people including those she has
alienated along the alcoholic way. That surely is one reason way the reader
ends up wanting to wish her well.

Sunday, 11 September 2016

In 1958, aged ten, my father took me on a day trip
from Folkestone to Boulogne aboard the Royal
Daffodil, one of the ancient ferries which British Railways used for the
Channel crossings. You didn’t need a proper passport – a disposable day
passport was available cheaply and easily. I found a terrific toy car – a Citroën
DS – in a Boulogne shop and on the way back through British Customs kept my
hand clamped over it in my raincoat pocket in the belief that it might be an
illegal import. It probably was.

Now as someone whose way out of England is still
through the Channel crossings, I read the News a bit anxiously as the border
between England and France gets harder each day, wondering who will close it
first. It was the English who inevitably opted out of Schengen – the word
“British” is inaccurate in these matters – but I believe it will be the French
who, one way or another, will shut the border completely. They would, wouldn’t
they?

There will be lots of people buying Hazareesingh’s
book. We would all like to know how the French think because we know that they
do think and that this is one of the reasons why they are so difficult to live with unlike the English who don’t think, just get on with
life as we have always lived it and intend to continue. We don’t, for example,
have to worry about heads of our Ruritanian state – we have them already neatly
lined up, hair parted, for the next one hundred years – and increasingly we
don’t have to worry about elections: we presently have a government which
simply installed itself, promptly telling Parliament that it is now a consultative body
like the old Russian Duma.

Hazareesingh’s quite long book is very readable and
often amusing. It has two weaknesses. It’s panorama of French thought is quite
often not much more than a series of thumbnails. It reminded me in this of
Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve
which I reviewed here a while back. Thumbnails are all right if you are looking
for a background briefing but I don’t belong to the class of people who need
background briefings on how to deal with the French. The second weakness is its
Oxford Common Room geniality. The author has been holed up in Balliol since
1990 and that does not bode well for anyone. At worst, he lets the French off
scot-free which may be one reason they have awarded his book one of their big
prizes, always a relief to have a foreigner who doesn't trash us.

Hazareesingh’s approach is broadly narrative
chronological and it is perhaps this approach which allows the author to avoid
anything which you might think of as a confrontation or contestation except in chapter 10 which is more decisive in this respect. What I would like
to have seen is more use of the possibilities inherent in the contrast of history and structure – thank you, Lévi-Strauss and Sartre – trying to tease
out how the structural awfulness of France today is the product of a history,
including an intellectual history. How come the French end up with the
paralysed figure of Hollande, who you could see as a sort of tribute act to
Brezhnev? How come they end up with so little liberty, so little equality, so
little fraternity? Why is it a police state? ( The author never mentions the
CRS). Why do the French hate each other so much? Why are they always attracted
to authoritarian solutions, left or right? How do they put up with having their lives micromanaged by the state, things closed when you want them open or not allowed to sell what you want, so that the only way to get a plastic bottle of Evian in Paris is to buy it from an illegal street trader?

Why is the history so grubby and
still unacknowledged as such – something on which Hazareesingh might have said more
than he does. There is a marked contrast with Germany here. Fanon – a fine thinker and writer - gets in, but that’s about it.
Why do they still go around denouncing each other? What is this childish rentreé into the trade union strike
season all about? Why have they been so incredibly conservative about everything down
to smoking themselves to death, not learning English, being the slowest to
adopt modern communications technology and media, thinking it part of les droits du chien to shit everywhere,
and so on and so forth? And one which surely ought to have interested the
author more, Why do so few – even none – of their universities figure in World Rankings?

I have a suggestion. The author is incredibly well-read
to the point where his book sometimes reads like short book reviews strung
together. He should take a deep breath, put all that aside, sit down and write
an essay setting out just what he thinks about France. He could title it How I think about the French, even
write it in French and put it out, a hundred pages long, no more, through a
Parisian publisher. He's done the spade-work already.

Thursday, 11 August 2016

I read this at a couple of sittings and enjoyed every bit of it. It's like Marxism; read this and you have the answer to everything. The ideas underpinning in it are strikingly simple, though only one of them is fully articulated.

First, even now countries are limited or enabled by their basic geography - where they are on the globe, whether they have rivers,mountains, natural harbours, fertile soil, forests or deserts. Marshall makes out a compelling case. Second, geopolitics - geographically influenced or determined political possibilities and necessities - geopolitics isalways Realpolitik. Your neighbours are unlikely to be your friends and you have to prepare for the worst. It's always going to be Them or Us, a zero-sum game. You must always be ready to fight.

It's this second, less articulated theory which gives the book its Boys Own Annual feel. They ( usually China, Russia) are out to get us and they will get us if we don't get there first. It's true that Marshall quite often shows understanding for and even some sympathy for what they are about - he gives a very good account of why President Putin felt he had no option but to take Crimea - but his suspects are the usual suspects and he has a Foreword by Sir John Scarlett (Tony Blair's man at MI6 and not exactly a persuasive choice) to back him up.

Keep that reservation in mind but do read the book. It's very well done and full of ideas and small asides you will never even have thought of. He does, for example, give an interesting geographical explanation of why the Americans eventually decided to use the H-bomb on Japan though it doesn't explain why they didn't give the Japanese a demonstration of its power on empty land before they used it on real cities. True, that would not have had the shocking power of the real thing and the Americans felt that it was the viciousness of the Japanese military spirit - don't forget their war crimes - which had to be broken.

There was a time – and
I don’t know when it ended – when if you were self-assured, had the necessary
leisure and some ability to write, you could write about pretty much anything
which took your fancy, expressing your opinions or sentiments, often in short
literary form (the essay), and you would have a decent chance of finding a
publisher who would put you into print. You would then become a contributor to
the genre of Belles Lettres.

At some point, belles lettres got put under pressure
and specifically by professionalised academic writing where it was obligatory
to distinguish fact and opinion and, in either case, obligatory
to situate what you were saying fully and explicitly in the field of what other
people had been saying - and preferably, very recently saying. The footnote and
the Bibliography are the outward markers of academic writing - you might even
say invented to mark the difference
with belles lettres.

Publishers - and I
suppose readers too - became wary of belles
lettres. What was left from what academic writing had taken over was
fiction, poetry and journalism, including the journalism of book reviews.
Nowadays, the last bastion of belles
lettres is the serious book review or essay in one of the serious Reviews: The New York Review of Books, The London
Review of Books, The Financial Times, and so on.

Lauren Elkin situates
her book within academic writing by providing copious notes – which I felt under
no pressure to read – and a fairly long Bibliography. But the jacket design –
very messy, actually – title page and quaint publishing house (Chatto and Windus)
situates this as a non-academic book. On the jacket flap we are told it is
“Part cultural meander, part memoir” – I am surprised they put it like that
because this is tantamount to saying that the book is belles lettres.

And none the worse for
that. It’s an interesting read, the short quasi-academic studies spliced with
personal narrative and the stage set changing from city to city. The title and
sub-title Flâneuse: Women Walk The City
in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London is not misleading but I would
bet a bit of money that the author was under some pressure from literary agent
and publisher to make it all hang together so that it could Fit into some
category – social history or literary representations of the city or sexual
discrimination at street level or just autobiography. There are many
possibilities, some of which would have led to the writing of a dreadful book,
dull and correct and easy to shelve.

I enjoyed reading this book, though
she lost me for a moment when late on she mentions keeping a dog in Paris, a
dog shit city when I lived there (1971 – 72) and even long after. But I did find her
narratives of Parisian history helped me understand how and why I have come to
dislike Paris. She narrates the tragedies which today repeat themselves as
farce: the ritual demonstrations, the immature bad temper (they were still
honking car horns last time I went, albeit less fervently than in the 1970s),
and the intense conservatism of the radicals, who think that the past is the
model for the future right down to the cigarettes they still smoke. If you think
Ruritania is stuck, try France - a country haunted by a collective memory of which several parts still have to be denied. Empire and Collaboration for starters.

I think the weakness of the book is that Elkin does not quite know what she stands for. On occasion, she
expresses a forceful opinion or cracks a telling joke but much of the time she
muses, a bit ironic, a bit fey. I made a mental contrast with Katie Roiphe. She should strike out a bit more, strut her
stuff rather than stroll it .

I’m
about to embark on a project that involves revisiting the classic texts of
second-wave feminism, and I’m planning to begin with a book I haven’t read
since I was 20: Shulamith Firestone’sThe
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, an ambitious
attempt at what its author called “a materialist view of history based on sex
itself”. My new book isThe
Best I Can Do(degree zero), a collection of short essays in which
the philosopher-turned-stamp-dealer Trevor Pateman reflects on everything from
bus passes to the semiotics of lipstick – and whether scholarship should be a
hobby rather than a salaried occupation.

Tuesday, 17 May 2016

The core of this book is a scholarly study of how Lolita was made.It's clever idea was to notice that Lolita is a road-novel in which Humbert Humbert and Lolita criss-cross America by car and then to ask how Nabokov, a Russian emigre who arrived in the USA in 1940, aged forty, knew the roads. The answer is that Nabokov travelled them and did so primarily in pursuit of butterflies though ostensibly on the way to this or that lecturing job. They were long trips and they absorbed whole summers and Nabokov made copious notes about everything - roads, motels, sky-scapes, landscapes. All the time, he was collecting butterfly specimens for museum collections where he had a paid curatorial role.

Roper makes a fascinating piece of road-scholarship out of this and it only weakens when at the end he throws in a study of Pale Fire and a brief review of Nabokov's later life in Switzerland which could have been left out. In contrast, there is nothing here on Nabokov's role in the making of the first film version of Lolita.

Roper tracks the geographical sources of specific passages in Lolita and does the same for literary sources and antecedents in Nabokov's own writing. He turns up interesting facts such as the information that one of Nabokov's colleagues solved the problem of his own taste for nymphets by marrying a fourteen-year old (there being many more places where this could be legally done circa 1930s - 1940s than there are now). Nabokov duly absorbs the information his colleague volunteers.

I thought this an interesting and worthwhile book. I would have cut the chapters which don't belong and I would have asked for more insight into the extended collaboration between Nabokov and his wife Vera, who agreed with Nabokov that he was a genius and who clearly played a large part in keeping the show on the road, literally and metaphorically - she drove, she took dictation, she wrote lots of the letters needed. But the nature of their relationship remains opaque; perhaps it was essentially banal, like the political positions they occasionally espoused.

Though the book has been adequately proof-read, someone forgot to check the Contents page with results for which that someone ought to win a prize for negligence.

Added 19 May:

I left out what may be the most important thing. In all those road trips across America, Nabokov was not driving. His wife drove or a student hired as a chauffeur drove. Nabokov sat in the passenger seat or the back seat writing. Even in the posed photograph on the front cover of Roper's book, he is not in the driving seat. I need to go back to the book and check if he ever drove at all - maybe did not know how to. It may be important: driving in the 1940s and 1950s was surely marked as a + M masculine characteristic. Nabokov ducks the + M role - and as a result gains writing time.

Thursday, 7 April 2016

This is the cover, ready for its ISBN barcode 978-0-9935879-0-0. Inside, 165 pages of text occupied by 26 essays as listed on the cover, extensively rewritten from my Blogs. Paperback, cover price £8.95

Available now online at www.cpibookdelivery.com. The link below should work!

Monday, 28 March 2016

This is an interesting,
articulate book which criticises the United Kingdom's failing tax system and proposes a fairer system and - at the same time - defends the legitimacy and effectiveness of deficit financing. It gets better as it goes along: the final chapter is very
good indeed in setting out a coherent progressive vision for UK tax policy. My
doubts centre on some of the lacunae, the things Murphy does not write about.
An enthusiast for government borrowing, treated as the painless creation of
debt which can be put to good use, he nowhere mentions two things: debt
servicing and Greece – the former is not mentioned at all and Greece gets just one mention for the size of its black economy (a quarter of total output).

Debt servicing matters
for a number for reasons. It’s true that most governments still have remarkably
little trouble selling bonds, even long-term ones, which promise a fixed return
each year. They have been doing it for centuries. But problems can arise and
they usually start in the second-hand market. Suppose a government issues a
£100 bond promising 5% per year (that’s £5 to the bond owner once a year) plus
face value back when the bond expires. Suppose it prices the bond at £100 and
sells out. If the bond market thinks that 5% is generous and that the
government is a dead cert to repay and that inflation is likely to be low,
second-hand bonds may start to trade at higher than the original price. In
contrast, if 5% seems mean or there are doubts about whether the government
will repay or concerns about inflation eating away the repayment value then the second-hand price will fall. All of these things can create problems when the government issues its next lot of bonds. They may
have to drop the price to £90 or £80 and still pay out £5 a year on the face
value and still have to come up with £100 at the end even though they only got
£80 or £90 to start with. It’s a further complication that if the bonds are
traded internationally, it becomes relevant what foreigners think they can use
£s for. If they think there is nothing the UK makes or does which they will
want to spend their pounds on, then that will adversely affect their valuation
of the bonds on offer. In the real world, some countries have currencies which
are to all intents and purposes worthless outside their own boundaries because
no one outside can think of anything they would want to do with that currency. It’s
only if you start offering fantastic rates of interest that they may begin to
look around to discover if maybe your economy actually produces something worth
buying or buying more of.

There is also the small
matter of how the government finds the money to pay the interest and repay the
bonds. If it spends sensibly the money it gets from bond sales, then economic
activity will increase and (in a well-run state) tax revenues will increase
with it and there is no problem – money will come in to service the debt. In other words, bond money has been used to invest, to make things happen which otherwise wouldn't. This
is the virtuous cycle which Murphy simply assumes. But if governments give away the money
on electoral bribes ( “Everyone can now retire at 50!”) or if it has a corrupt
or inefficient tax collection service ( = Greece), then no money will be
generated to service the debt. In such circumstances, governments can try to
sell new bonds to pay the debt on the old ones but sooner or later the market
will realise that the government is now running a Ponzi scheme and will refuse to
buy the bonds. At this point, the government can ‘fess up that it cannot
service its debt and go into default. Or else, it has to cut back on important activities like the health service and
schools and divert the money saved to paying interest on debt – at which point
it loses popular support and in addition the ability to go on funding the retirement at 50 it has made everyone think was possible.

Somewhere in this
interesting book such matters should have been addressed.

Saturday, 5 March 2016

This review was first published on www.trevorpatemanblog.com 27June 2011. It has been posted,unchanged,here to link to the immediately preceding Blog about book publishing.

This is the most unsatisfactory academic work that I have read for a long time. I will explain why shortly.

At the end of World War Two, hundreds of thousands of people were on the move right across Europe. As Allied soldiers in vast numbers moved deeper into Italy and Germany, vast numbers of people moved in the opposite direction.

Who were they? There were civilians trying to get back to homes they had left, either as forced labourers or refugees. There were Jews who had survived the Holocaust, many or most of them traumatised, not trying to return home but instead looking to find a route out of Europe and - generally - a route to Palestine. There were those who, for many reasons, did not want to end up in Russian-occupied or Soviet-subservient areas, including not only those from eastern Germany and central Europe but also from the Balkans. There were "ordinary" criminals who had pursued regular criminal lives, thieving and profiteering, under the shelter of Nazi criminality. There were probably some ordinary German soldiers who had done nothing particularly wrong but who did not want to live in Germany any more. And there were SS and Nazi personnel, including war criminals, large and small.

Many of these very many people gravitated southwards, down into Austria, across the border into Italy and then, quite often, out of Europe altogether through the northern Italian ports: their destinations were Latin America, the Middle East, North America, Australia.

Steinacher is primarily interested in those who were wanted or who knew they should have been wanted by the Allies: the criminals and the war criminals, high-ranking and lowly, many of whom evaded justice and emigrated, mostly to Latin America and mostly to Argentina. But some of them just hid out in Italy and, in due course, made their way back to Austria or Germany with new identities.

Steinacher's book fails for a number of reasons.

First, it is less like a book and more like a notebook: lots of miscellaneous facts, disjointed, endlessly repetitive, the chronology erratic. I find it hard to believe that anyone at the English-language publisher, Oxford University Press, read the book before agreeing to publish it. Read it cover to cover, as I have done, and it is like reading the first draft of a Ph. D.

Second, though it points the finger at the civil authorities in South Tyrol, at the Vatican, at the International Red Cross and at the US intelligence services as aiders and abetters of criminal escapes, the finger wobbles. Steinacher gives us no precise idea as to the proportion of criminal elements among the many thousands of people on the move who sought help from these agencies. He simply fails to paint the larger picture, clearly and in detail. At the end of the book, you have no idea whether the criminal element was one in two or one in two thousand desperate people knocking at those doors (except that you can figure that the US intelligence services were in a different position - they knew who they were dealing with and they only wanted to deal with dodgy characters, especially after the anti-communist dynamic came to dominate after 1947).

Third, the book is largely useless to anyone of a straightforward lawyerly frame of mind. Steinacher constantly suggests answers, but rarely can one pin down a clear answer to these kind of question (let's use the Vatican as an example):

What civil or criminal offences , if any, did Vatican official X commit in rendering assistance to a fugitive of justice or as-yet uninculpated criminal, Y?

Was the whole Vatican orgnisation implicated in the activities of its individual officials, so that it should be regarded as a criminal organisation rather than just as an organisation which housed criminal officials?

To answer these questions, you have to work out if official X knew or had good reason to suspect that Y was being sought for crimes committed or was on the move because of such crimes, even if not yet inculpated. Steinacher simply doesn't work it out for most of his illustrative cases.

And you have to look at funding decisions and at euphemisms and "Confidential" markings in official correspondence.

True, there is the obstacle that the Vatican archives for this period are still closed to outsiders - the best evidence for the claim that they will incriminate, all the way up.

Some of the things Vatican officials did can be explained without imputing criminal intent. Many people had no documents and officials were willing to take your word for who you were and give you a document saying that you were who you said you were. This then allowed you to present yourself to the International Committee of the Red Cross who would furnish you with a one-way travel document to which you could then get a Latin American visa affixed.

The slackness of these procedures can be explained both in terms of having to work under pressure - there were a lot of people knocking at your door - and as a basically charitable, humanitarian response to human distress.

But when someone told you they had been born in A when you could tell from their accent (or their mother tongue) that they had never been near the place, then you became a party to fraud when you helped them fabricate a new identity for themselves. Even more so, when you suggested a suitable identity. (South Tyrol figures largely in Steinacher's story because its unsettled legal status meant that if you claimed to have been born there, you could also claim to be stateless and that meant the Red Cross, rather than the International Refugee Organisation, could deal with you).

In addition, Steinacher is able to claim that when high authorities in the Vatican and ICRC were told that their on-the-ground bureaucrats and systems were allowing wanted war criminals to escape from justice, they did little or nothing to change personnel or tighten up procedures. In both cases, it began to look as if the only "identity" you needed was that of being anti-communist.

All this said, Steinacher leaves us in no general doubt that in 1944 - 47 there were numerous Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers in South Tyrol, in the International Committee of the Red Cross and in the Vatican, who helped Nazi war criminals escape from Allied justice. This included people in senior, powerful positions - like the Pope's friend, Bishop Hudal - who knew exactly what they were doing and why.

Many Nazis ended up in Latin America, especially Argentina. Some ended up working for the CIA. It would be another book, but an interesting one, to trace the part they played in the reactionary politics of their adoptive countries and the amoral realpolitik of the CIA. Perhaps the invasion of the Falkland Islands was not just about Argentinian nationalism but also about Nazi revenge.

On several occasions reviewing books here and elsewhere, I have had the feeling, "No one has actually read this before signing it off and sending it to the printers". The feeling has arisen in different ways.In the case of Gerald Steinacher's Nazis On The Run (Oxford University Press 2011) the book was obviously a first draft, repetitive and unstructured with inconclusive arguments. Surely, I felt, if an editor of any kind had actually read this - cover to cover - before it went to press, they would have called halt and asked for quite a lot of re-writing. (I realise my review of this book is not on this site, so I will add it as my next Blog).

Then in the case of Suzanne Rindell's The Other Typist (2013) reviewed on this Blog24 June 2014, I found myself making a list of anachronisms which damaged the verisimilitude of a text which aimed to sound like the voice of a 1920s American woman. Surely, I thought, any friend of the author or reasonably alert publisher's editor would have underlined them and proposed alternatives (or told the author to find alternatives).

And then this week, reading the enthusiastic endorsements on the cover of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn (originally 2009), I really did wonder, Have they all actually read it?

Reading a book takes time, a lot of time. It's very hard to make a profit on it - I write that as someone for whom, over a fifty years period, reading comes second only to sleeping in the hours of my life it has absorbed. Publishers know there is no profit in reading, which is why modern publishing is geared towards making key publishing decisions without reading any books.
I discover this as I look at publishers' websites - I have a book I want to offer them. Quite reasonably, I think, some of them want an initial A4 Book Proposal in order to make a quick decision on whether to take any interest at all. But quite a few of them want quite a lot more than that. On an eight page form, you not only give them a title, a table of contents, a synopsis (helpfully characterised as suitable for a jacket blurb), but also a target market, promotional venues, a list of names of those who will provide product endorsements ("puffs") which can be printed on the jacket, the names of a couple of friends who will say that you are a jolly good person, and so on. There may be a caveat - we will, of course, send the book out for independent review before we make a decision - but it looks to me that this proposal is not just a piece of bureaucratic gatekeeping, it's basically as close to your book as the publishing house is going to get. Get past the gatekeeper and from then on you will simply be waved through.

There is, of course, a fictional trope of the Author and Editor huddled over a manuscript, of late night phone calls, of arguments and bust-ups. I am beginning to think that nowadays that may be all it is, a fictional trope.

Wednesday, 2 March 2016

I haven’t seen the film. Good films are often based on short
or indifferent literary texts, but which have the potential to be transformed
by cinematic treatment. Crowd scenes, dance hall scenes, tense dinner table
settings, desolate graveyards, departing passenger liners, are all things which
can be magicked by film and this book contains all of those.

As for the book itself, my paperback copy carries 15 major
review endorsements of the literary text. I am unnerved. I am clearly missing something.
For I found the writing flat to the point of banality and the narrative without
effective pacing. I nearly gave up around page 100 but then the book does pick
up and I made it to the end. Nonetheless, at no point did I find myself moved by what could be a moving
story. Instead, I felt the story was being neatly and sometimes tritely
packaged, with some heavy-handed labelling to make sure that we don’t miss the
point, that Eilis is digging a hole for herself etc.

Let me give one example from a stage of the book where I was
struggling to keep going, from page 89:

By the time they were removing
the trifle dishes, the hall was a mass of smoke and animated talk. Men sat in
groups with one or two standing behind them; others moved from group to group,
some with bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags that they passed around…..
Eilis thought, as she sat down with a glass of sherry in her hand, that it
could have been a parish hall anywhere in Ireland on the night of a concert or
a wedding …

This reads like a set of instructions for creating a film
scene; and it tells rather than shows. There is nothing here to make us feel
the animated talk; we just know it is supposed to be out there somewhere.

But all those 15 critics, including some heavyweights, can’t be wrong.